Ted Cruz, a former presidential candidate and one of GOP nominee Donald Trump’s chief campaign rivals, officially threw his support behind the Republican nominee Friday.
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“I’ve made this decision for two reasons”.
“A year ago, I pledged to endorse the Republican nominee, and I am honoring that commitment”, the senator said. And I intend to keep my word.
The Texas senator continued to lay out the “six key policy differences” that informed his decision to eventually vote for the man he once referred to as “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar”.
Cruz had been under intense pressure to get behind Trump, with many citing the GOP unity pledge the senator signed a year ago.
The move – three days before Trump’s critical first debate with Clinton – comes as the Trump and Cruz camps have moved closer in recent weeks.
And yet, Cruz says this in a statement he released today: “Our country is in crisis. And if you don’t want to see a Hillary Clinton presidency, I encourage you to vote for him”.
“One way to think about it is, if Ted Cruz’s stand against Donald Trump was a purely principled one – based on a combination of disagreement with Trump’s position on the policies as well as because of the attacks that Trump made against Cruz’s father and wife – we might have expected him to continue to hold out and withhold an endorsement from Donald Trump”, Dr. Mark Jones, a political science fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told ATTN:.
The younger Trump’s comments follow extensive reporting of how the GOP presidential candidate got his start in property development in part thanks to a $1 million loan from his father, Fred Trump, in the late 1960s or early 1970s. In addition to sharing an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz, Trump also implied that Cruz’s father was involved in the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy.
And Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has said Republicans who don’t back Trump could pay a price down the road.
A conservative consultant with knowledge of both Cruz’s and Trump’s presidential campaigns told TheBlaze Friday that the Texas senator was endorsing Trump in order to “salvage his career”.
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Eric Trump on Friday defended his father’s self-made real estate mogul narrative, saying the Republican presidential nominee was the epitome of the American dream for having “gone from just about nothing” to become a successful real estate mogul in NY.
